Roxanne Tellier – The 24 Hour News Cycle Will Kill You

My name is Roxanne and I am a political news junkie. There. I’ve said it. And it’s the truth.

The 24 hour news cycle is like heroin – it’s a daily hit. At first you’re just chipping. You walk by the TV set and catch the end of some political atrocity that the talking heads are dicing into increasingly small, indigestible bits, and you sniff at the silliness. Maybe you suck your teeth at some inanity uttered by an obviously biased and paid hack.

But the next time you pass that same TV, you realize you’re beginning to recognize the lead characters in this drama, those with the weird names like Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper. Before you know it, you’re wondering when Mika and Joe Scarborough will set a date for their wedding, and you’re even starting to know the bit players.

As you sink deeper into the drama that political news has become, your ‘event TV’ viewing starts to largely consist of the big names, like Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell, and Sunday is definitely broken into a Face The Nation morning and a Last Week with John Oliver night.

Comic relief soon consists only of the monologues from the late night hosts riding the Orange Wave; Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. And Samantha Bee is your new girlcrush.

Nothing else can hold your attention. Your regularly scheduled relaxation television viewing has been supplanted by the need to be constantly on guard and aware of what the politicians are trying to slide past the people. Your love/hate relationship with current events has you so tied up in knots that you’d throw your television out the window, but then you wouldn’t be able to punch the screen!

Your background music now consists of CNNLive, and listening to the broadcasted testimony of Jeff Sessions, and the hours of posturing that follow as the anchors play good cop/back cop trying to uncover what just happened … and you realize …

you’re in deep. No longer content with news clips from as long as a week ago, nope, last week can’t give the hit of a clip from the night before .. or the hour before.

You’re as addicted as any junkie jonesing for a fix. You’re hooked on news, man, shucking and jiving and slapping your arm to pop up a vein.

The intensity of the last few months has left many breathless – the constant tweeting, the ridiculous and unenforceable edicts, the Executive Orders carving great swaths of America into more caviar for the 1% while taking the very bread out of the mouths of children – our noses are being constantly rubbed into the most shameless and flagrant abuse of power seen on our shores, in our lifetime.

We have front row tickets to the unravelling of democracy. You can look away, but it’s like that car crash on the highway … you know you’re gonna slow down and take a peek at the carnage, just like every other looky loo.

CNN, FOX, MSNBC, Headline News and all the little brother and sister cable and internet networks know that they have a willing and captive audience slavering for that next news hit. And they have 24 hours of airwaves to fill. When the cravings kick in, it’s a match made in hell.

You want to hear more, more, more – but there’s a danger in this addiction. Networks have their own politics, and trying to keep viewers tuning in is their quest. Regardless of how ‘fair and balanced’ these behemoths purport to be, their real bias is to finding what angle will bring in the most viewers, and pump in those yummy advertising dollars. Rachel Maddow may love her cheap blazers, but the execs are wearing much more expensive apparel, and that’s just the way they like it.

While it is indeed wonderful to have this banquet of 24/7 information at our fingertips, there’s a real risk in letting the drip drip drip of what can be mere speculation and innuendo turn us into armchair quarterbacks, pseudo-intellectuals, prisoners of little bubble fortresses where all within think alike and talk alike, who can neither hear nor understand those in all the other bubble fortresses who don’t think and talk exactly like us.

The divisiveness that has become our new and violent normal has it’s seeds in the lengths networks will go to, to shape their viewers points of view.

The 24 hour news cycle presumes that every issue has only two sides to it, and only one side is right. Of course, that’s neither true nor tenable. You are allowed, and even encouraged, as part of your civic duty, to understand the issues that preoccupy your nation and government. A news network, supposedly neutral, does not have the right to impose it’s own morality and biases upon it’s viewers. Your choice of network should not also be the source of your ethics and morality.

And yet – the networks often do exactly that. The networks act as the ‘dealers’ selling hits of outrage to the news junkies.

In the hands of the partisan network, the viewer learns little hard information, nor is there much depth to any argument. The ‘panels,’ made up of ‘experts’ chosen to imply that all sides of an issue are covered, are often little more than a group of people paid to whip up alarm, outrage, and frenzied fear.

And yes – that’s true of both the right and the left leaning media.

Yes, we need to be aware of the issues of the day, in our own country and in those countries where decisions made by their leadership can have an impact on the safety and governance of our own.

But I think it’s time to sort out the wheat from the chaff; the journalism from the junk food. Time to reward the solid writers and broadcasters who attempt, within their network, to work to actual fair and balanced standards. Time to turn the channel from those who depend on an atmosphere of fear and uncertainly, to those measured voices who seek to inform and explain what many of us may know instinctively, but have been counselled to ignore by those who profit from this destabilized and increasingly fractured populace.

I’ve gotta get off this apple sauce. I’m going to have to go cold turkey, and stay off the politics needle until there’s something I can actually do to impact the injustices I condemn.

Ignorance is only bliss for the ignorant. A little, biased, knowledge can be a dangerous thing. And turning the people against each other only profits those who market civil unrest and war. Resist. But resist wisely, and from a place of common ground and a desire to work together, not tear each other apart.

Roxanne Tellier has been singing since she was 10 months old … no, really. Not like she’s telling anyone else how to live their lives, because she’s not judgmental, and most 10 month olds need a little more time to figure out how to hold a microphone. She has also been a vocalist with many acts, including Tangents, Lady, Performer, Mambo Jimi, and Delta Tango. In 2013 she co-hosted Bob Segarini’s podcast, The Bobcast, and, along with Bobert, will continue to seek out and destroy the people who cancelled ‘Bunheads’.